I recently purchased a KingFast 30GB SSD (F6-30GB-SATA 3) to give a bit of a boost to my old laptop (Acer Aspire 3100 - 2GB RAM). The issue is that I keep getting "ata1.00 - Failed to IDENTIFY (err_mask=0x4)" and the drive will not show up whatsoever once the distro is booted. FDisk and blkid both show nothing beyond the USB flash drive I booted the LiveCD from, as if the drive ceases to exist after showing the SATA link up/down several times and stopping after a 4th or 5th notification that the SATA link is "up". I even tried copying the contents of my laptop's old HDD over to the SSD (setup partitions, as well) and when the system starts up, I get a minimal GRUB shell, which tells me that the system can indeed read the SSD, otherwise it would have nothing to boot GRUB from whatsoever (as the flash drive is not plugged in, at that point).

The BIOS is the most recent version (v3.13) and shows the SSD by name with no issue, however, there is no option to set IDE/AHCI/etc. This drive does work in my desktop with absolutely no issue, as a side note. I tried installing Linux via VMware to the SSD from within Win7, which causes a kernel panic sometime during the boot up when the SSD is back in the laptop.

I've tried live and installation modes for both XUbuntu, LUbuntu and SparkyLinux, all to no avail. Can anyone shed some light on this? I've been researching for multiple hours, no boot option (noapic, nolapic) has had any effect... Yet the laptop can apparently boot GRUB from the SSD, read it from the BIOS, but no distro of Linux has been able to read it yet. Thanks in advance!

There have been reports that Kingfast disks come with a partition label in Chinese characters. This can be viewed on Windows disk manager, but linux PartedMagic distro refuses to load while the disk is attached to the system. The solution was to remove the partition label under windows or to hot-plug the disk and then delete the label under linux. Mind you - I have not tested this myself.